Wednesday, October 10, 2012

The Death Of The Republican Party. . . again

This came up before the debate, but it's still relevant. Usually, it’s leftist pundits who talk about the civil war within Republican ranks and the death of the party. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read that the Republicans were about to split into two parties, leaving the “harmonious” Democrats free to rule forever. Give me a break. Well, it’s back! Only, this time, it’s conservatives making the claim. Arggg!

For some time now, the Republicans have been struggling over the ideological future of the party. But it’s not the struggle you think it is. The truth about the Republican Party is that it is controlled by Neocons and the Religious Right, who have divided the party between them. Foreign and economic policy are controlled by the Neocons, who favor foreign adventuring, unlimited military and diplomatic spending, and anything Big Business wants. Social policy is controlled by the Religious Right. And virtually every party leader respects this division, even as the two sides pretend to be in an ideological struggle to wrestle the party away from each other.

This fake struggle continued in the primaries. What you saw in the primaries was candidates like Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachmann fighting on behalf of the Religious Right and guys like Newt and Rick Perry fighting on behalf of the Neocons, both claiming the other side was unelectable. But here’s the punch line. . . every one of them held the exact same views. They were all Neocons on economic and foreign policy issues and Religious Right on social issues. Every single one of them favored pouring federal money into Big Business projects, increasing the power of the Federal government over the economy (minus a few minor regulations), muscular military and foreign policy, and banning the menace of gays and abortion from our midsts with Constitutional amendments. Only the rhetoric varied.

By selling themselves as being at war with each other, when they aren’t, they are trying to keep their supporters from noticing that neither of these groups represents conservatism and neither of these groups actually offers a genuine alternative to the other. In effect, it’s clones telling us they are polar opposites.

With that background in mind, here is something Rush said a couple weeks ago that needs to be addressed (and he’s not alone):

“If Obama wins, let me tell you what it’s the end of: The Republican Party. There’s gonna be a third party that’s gonna be oriented toward conservatism. . . I know if Obama wins, the Republican Party is gonna try to maneuver things so conservatives get blamed.”

Wrong. For one thing, there will be no third party. There will never be a third party. That is not how our system works. Being a winner takes all system means that it makes no sense to start a third party because you know you will never supplant either of the major parties – and don’t try to tell me it happened 250 years ago, because this was a very different country then.

Secondly, read the above again. The Religious Right and the Neocons like this arrangement. They whine in public about being outsiders because that’s good for fundraising and avoiding blame, but the truth is they control the party. Why would they leave? The people who would leave are the Tea Party types who showed up in 2009 and found the establishment Religious Right and Neocons to be intensely hostile to their “crazy ideas” of fiscal sanity and smaller government. But the Tea Party people won’t leave because they are smarter than that. They are into results, and they have correctly determined that the only way to get results is to take over the Republican Party and change its direction. Forming a third party only takes them out of the game. So who exactly is planning to leave if Romney loses?

What’s really going on here is theater. Both the Neocons and the Religious Right know that Romney has not been adopted by either of their supporters and they simply don’t want to embrace him for fear of seeming out of step with their followers. Add in the fear that he will lose, and what you have is both sides trying to blame the other side for the loss they are expecting. The idea is to make sure that their own followers do not blame them so they can maintain the status quo without worry. If their followers realized the truth, then it becomes likely their followers would be enticed to the new third group slowly making their way up the ladder – the Tea Party. This blame game is meant to keep each side seeming victimized and their followers angry about that, so that nobody starts asking questions.

66 comments:

There is no new frontier. You can't immigrate from America to a promised land of milk and honey where there are only conservatives, no rock music, no profanity, no adultery and where nobody drinks anything other than spring water. And I wish some of these really strange fringe players could get that through their heads.

I don't see romney as wanting to pour Money into Big Business. His desire to sell off GM stock is heartening to me. That said I am unsure that he would go so far as to say eliminate the subsidies to ADM. Maybe he would get rid of the Ethanol subsidy but again he'd have to be willing to butt heads with not just the DNC but the Neocon establishment Senators that put it in as well.

I do think that he would listen to the Tea Party ideas but I am not sure he'll be aboard with very many of them because he is a politician first. My only hope is that he sees teh need to cut spending and is forced to go to Tea Party candidates to get this done as they are likely the ones to champion this in the house and Senate. If the GOP does not win the Senate however speniding cuts will be a moot point. They won't do it.

Fact of the matter is that the DNC and GOP have set a false narrative that insures the government continues to grow. dems fight tooth and nail to expand the government and the GOP pretends to have success when they stop them from expanding. no one ever points out that at best you stalemate and at worst the other guy wins.

Honestly I'd like to see not just three parties but four or more. the monolothic control over committees in the house and Senate just because one side got 50% plus of the seats is what is really damaging. The system may work with two parties the way it is but the system is broken.

If Nancy P had to worry about an internal challenge to her Speakership in the house as various factions manuevered to stop Obamacare becuase no one party held such a yoke over 50 plus members it would never have been signed into law. But I don't know.

T-Rav, There is no problem. My point is that it's silly to think there's going to be some magical break up. I'm also pointing out that this talk of "conservatives" breaking away is a crock because the "conservatives" these people are talking about already control the party. It's all just a big PR game to avoid responsibility.

The one danger to them all are the Tea Party people who don't care about the Religious Right issues or the Neocon issues. And I think they will succeed in taking over the party eventually.

Anthony, The answer remains unclear. Romney has demonstrated genuinely conservative instincts to me, i.e. Tenth Amendment, small government type, instincts, but I'm not sure what his relationship will be to Neocon policy yet. He might end up being Neocon-lite, but I'm not sure until we see him in action. Ask me again in four years.

Indi, I do think Romney has the right political instincts, but he's also clearly pragmatic enough to know that he can't achieve anything without the rest of the party. So my guess is that a lot of the things we'd like to see (like the elimination of farm subsidies) won't happen because it's a fight he would lose and he's not going to start hopeless fights -- there's too much else to do right now.

My guess is that he will pick 3-4 issues and fight for those and will let "the system" have its way on the other things.

I don't really want to see more than two parties. Countries with systems like that tend to be a mess. But I would like to see the Republicans become a party that genuinely wants smaller government rather than being a party that just wants a different looking big government than the Democrats.

Well, the good news is whoever wins, the Tea Party will stay around to continue to push for fiscal responsibility and smaller government. And push hard. The only way to effect change is to be part of the system, not outside the system. Otherwise it's just "noise" as Obama put it.

I have hope that Romney can be a REAL politician (in the best possible use of that word) and work WITH Congress in a BIPARTISAN way to correct our coarse, and bully when necessary.

Bev, I think you're right about the Tea Party. I think they are here to stay and I think they are determined. They know that it's futile to try to form a third party, so they have set out to take over the Republican party, just as the progressive took over the Democrats -- all behind the scenes, bit by bit. And I suspect they will eventually win and will take control of the party. That's the point the Neocons of Religious Right might try to split off, though I doubt it.

I think the idea of bipartisanship is unrealistic. The two sides are simply too far apart and the Democrats will have no incentive to work with Romney. The lesson they have drawn since Bush II is that hyper-partisanship and total obstructionism pays off, so I think they will do that and I think Romney would be foolish to put himself in a position where he needs them. That said, I think he will work with any Democrat who is willing to work with him and he'll make bipartisan noises -- as compared to "you lost."

I know, Andrew. But being affiliated as I am with the Religious Right, I had to give a bit of needling. :-)

I find talk of a third party merely annoying. It's not going to happen, and as much as some people don't like it when you tell them they're wasting their vote that way--well, they're wasting their vote. I may be happily ideological and extremist, but I also pride myself on recognizing political realities.

I generally just find talk of third parties to be silly. It's the kind of thing people with no real grasp of politics fantasize about.... "we'll splinter off and then the whole country will join us!" Yeah, right.

The reason I mention it here is twofold. First, that someone as prominent as Rush would push this stupid idea is troubling. He should know better and he shouldn't be suggesting that this is even in the realm of possibility.

Secondly, I mention this because I see this as part of a false bit of advertising by these two groups to maintain this false outsider status which they then use for fund raising purposes and to try to keep people from waking up to the fact that their ideas aren't working. Both the RR and the Neocons keep pushing this idea that somehow they are outsiders and the party never listens to them even though they are all the party really does listen to. I find that kind of deception to be annoying.

It may be of interest to the room that Ingraham has Rand Paul on and they are picking apart Romney's foreign policy. Ingraham's opinion doesn't matter to me as it will be different tomorrow, but Rand's is that Romney is a foreign-policy conservative though he campaigns like a NeoCon on the issue. I, frankly, don't see the NeoCon stumping myself, but it may simply be a matter of degrees. All the other primary candidates sounded much more hawkish than Romney, but Romney wasn't dovish either.

tryanmax, Rand Paul is an odd duck when it comes to foreign policy. He's part isolationist like his father, but he's part "muscular foreign policy" like Reagan. I don't honestly know what Romney is yet, but I get the sense he is more like Reagan -- muscular policy, shape events when necessary, but not into nation building (which is the Neocon thing). Again, we will need to wait to see how he acts, but so far, the things he's said tell me he's not into nation building.

I agree that if anyone splits off, it will be the Religious Right, but it won't be until after they lose their power over the party. And that will depend on what the Tea Party people do when they finally do take over the party. They may just ignore social policy, which would allow the RR to continue, or they may apply their smaller-government stance to social policy, which will drive the RR away.

At that point, I suspect the RR will move to the Democrats and try to push out the atheists.

Andrew, I've never really cared much about the whole insider/outsider thing. There are a lot of idiots who've never spent a day in Washington, and there are a lot of solidly conservative people who've lived half their lives there.

I don't think it's a good thing, certainly, to spend all your time inside the Beltway; that only leads to seclusion and groupthink (i.e. Karl Rove). But it matters more where you stand on the issues, not what your geographical location is.

My money is on the Libertarians. They don't want to be a party of the Republicans anymore because they get no respect. They may try and form a legitimate third party full of Ron Paulites. But then again, they've tried it before to no avail.

T-Rav, I don't mean it in terms of "inside the beltway". I mean it in terms of whose views get accounted for by the party. The Religious Right in particular whines that they are "outsiders" whose views get ignored by the party and they are constantly threatening that they won't support the party if their views don't finally get addressed. Yet, their views are adopted 100% by the party in every instance. It's just public relations to keep their followers agitated and feeling like they need to see themselves as insurgents rather than as the rulers of the party.

The neocons do something similar, though with a slightly different twist. They act like they are the brains behind the party who were tossed out and now need to try to push the party "back" to where it had been -- even though it never left.

It's all about tricking their supporters into thinking they need to keep fighting and donating to "finally get" what they've already got.

Bev, In a sense I agree with you, except that I don't think there are many Paulites IN the party. I think they are already out there in third party land and they just pretend to be Republicans to support Paul and in the hopes of pulling the Tea Party people to them. But the Tea Party people are not Libertarians. They are small government conservatives with no interest in the conspiracy theories, isolationism, or drug legalization.

I know that countries with four or more parties that have to brocker an agreement are a mess. that is what I like about it. I figure we are better off the harder it is for them to do anything.

That being said it seems that it is happening outside the party. essentially the Tea Party is a political movement divorced from the Party Big Wigs that is a Party within a Party.

In New York they have the Conservative Party since the GOP out there is futher to the left of Joseph Stalin (Mayor Bloomberg) but not quite as left as the DNC. I don't think we'll ever break the two party system but there seem to be on the conservative side movements outside the leadership who are so incensed with not being listened to that they are finding vehicles to raise their voices. that does seem new.

Indi, The Tea Party is inside the party. They are like a virus slowly moving up the ranks, taking over position after position. I think it is only a matter of time before the current leadership find themselves tossed out.

The Conservative Party in New York is the perfect example of what is wrong with third parties. They are basically a joke. They have no power and never will have power. And because they are outside the Republican Party, they have no influence either. They are basically a tantrum organization that will keep New York from ever moving toward the right.

Okay, really, now the State Department is saying they never said the Benghazi attacks were caused by a film. Seriously??? Are they kidding?? And that the attacks were "unprecedented". Well, except for those two little embassies that blown up during the Clinton Administration and well, there's our Embassy in Iran. So of course, I can understand why they would think that our Embassies being attacked is "unprecedented" especially on 9/11 after we've killed...er...Obama killed bin Laden. Grrrrrr.

Bev, That's stunning. It's not like we don't have dozens of video clips of them making those statements over and over to any camera that would listen! Do they really think we would forget?

As for being unprecedented, you are absolutely right. There were those two huge attacks! There have also been dozens of smaller attacks against embassies. This is nothing unprecedented by any stretch of the imagination.

Indi, The problem with small parties like that isn't that they stop things from happening, it's that weird things happen because they get some of their ideas passed into law as a condition for agreeing to the easy stuff like budgets.

That is the problem with small parties, they tend to get really radical policies tossed in as the price of getting bigger things. And it's usually not anything useful or terribly relevant. It's just the fringe stuff.

Andrew - Whoever is tossed under the bus, it won't be Obama. He had no idea there were any security issues because he had not attended any security briefings in weeks. He probably has not attended since personally killing bin Laden in hand to hand combat because bin Laden's death ended terrorism once and for all. Oopsey!

Bev, LOL! Nicely put! I am stunned that Obama misses so many security briefings.... actually, I guess I'm not. He sees the job mainly as being a figurehead -- except when he did that hand-to-hand thing.

As I said the day after the attacks, even if the State Department didn't have advanced warning of the attacks (which they did) there should have been more security (and I don't mean Marines, I know that Embassy security is handled by Regional Security Officers, who tended to be ex-soldiers or ex-cops). Given all the armed gangs wandering around Benghazi, common sense would dictate a strong security presence.

Terrorists and other bad actors are always on the lookout for low hanging fruit. An Ambassador in a hard to defend building (the defensibility of consulates varies, but it sounds like the building in Benghazi was on the low end of the range) with a light security presence fits that description pretty well.

Andrew, interesting that you should bring up Rand's isolationist tendencies so immediately b/c he was working really hard to distance himself from those today. It put a discernible tinge on what he was trying to say. Considering all the pieces, it leaves me thinking the same as you, that Romney is a probable Reaganite on foreign policy.

Anthony, I agree. I think it's a failure all around, even if you don't have the warnings. This can happen in almost any country and certainly should be something the State Department should be on the look out for in unstable or unsettled countries. This was entirely avoidable.

tryanmax, That's my thinking too. I think Romney's foreign policy will probably be most like Reagan's -- which would be good for us. Despite the smears of Reagan's foreign policy as cowboy diplomacy, he really was man who knew when to get involved and when not, took care of American interests, and knew that we cannot police the world. That all changed under GW Bush, who I see as the first modern Neocon.

I'm not surprised that Rand Paul is backing off his isolationism because it's a mistake to think that the public is isolationist -- they aren't. They just don't want to be involved everywhere and forever. They want to fix problems and move on, not try to remake the world.

K, if I can jump in, Andrew has written repeatedly about the so-cons who want to use gov't to legislate a "moral society." Those so-cons are nearly synonymous with the religious right. In my own experience, it is the rare exception that is the politically active religious individual who recognizes the advantage of small government for religious institutions. Most of them just want to take over the gov't and have it do the work for them.

Hopefully I didn't take you too seriously. I detected a note of sarcasm in your comment, but I wasn't sure how far it extended.

K, I have watched politics very closely for a long time from the inside and the outside, and I can tell you that the Tea Party people are nothing like the Religious Right people who control and speak for the Religious Right. Those are people who care little about economics, caring only about a handful of religious issues (gays, abortion, prayer in schools) and lately have been creeping into leftist environmentalism. They do not believe in small government because they want to use big government to get their religious beliefs imposed and because they want to use government money to back their favorite causes. This was part of W Bush's compassionate conservatism, where he wanted to funnel money directly to churches to deal with things like poverty and AIDS in Africa.

Certainly, there are RR people (like our own T-Rav) who do care about all issues and who do favor small government, but make no mistake that the movement's leaders and activists favor very large, strong government -- they just want it to do different things than it currently does. And I can tell you that if the left had no embraced atheism, they would be on the far left today.

tryanmax, That's right. There is a BIG difference between religious conservatives and the people who run and represent the Religious Right. The RR are very much focused on the use of government power to get their agenda forced upon the country, and nothing about their agenda is small government.

The Conservative party exists because the GOP in New York are essentially not an alternative. Bloomberg is an easy example. Generally when moderate Republicans start talking of taking liberal positions such as Pro abortion it ususally translates into a hose to liberal compromises and a heck of a lot of spending and regulation.

The reason you have a conservative party is that the GOP there are not just Por-Abortion, for Gay marraige or just "moderately" left on social policies. They are for higher taxes, they are for increased spending, they are for any nanny state regulation that can be dreamed up including regulating the size of Coke bottles and the sale of light bulbs.

You can talk about them being a joke and never getting anything done but from their viewpoint why vote for a Republican who is going to do the opposite of what they believe in their name.

The Tea Party may be inside the Republican party but they are not getting the donations from the lobbyists because they are not signing on to the earmarks and the regulations big business wants. so they are truly outside and if they don't change the system they will morph into the neocons you despise.

The fact of the matter is we can talk about the Policos side of this which is getting things done but when it falls too far outside of the Ideologues purpose then it does not matter. That is when they quit supporting the Politicos for a Third Party Fantasy. Why should it matter to them if you are not going to allow them what they want anyways.

The third parties and Tea Party organizations are not the problem. they are the sympton. It means the parties have stopped listening to what people want.

Under a two party system we had a law (CIRA) that forced banks to give out loans they new people could not pay for. These banks forced to bundle and sell the loans with others that were less risky in an attempt to mitigate their risk.

This same two party system allowed the government institutions in 2006 a pass when the auditors (OFHEO) uncovered malfeaseance and warned them of an impending financial collapse.

After the collapse instead of fixing the problem they bought everyone out, monopolized the banking industry, tookover the companies with stock buyouts and then designated these banks to big to fail and now there is griping we need to reinstitue the same CIRA measures that led to this.

Quite frankly I can't think of any ideas crazier than what this two party system has already implmented and I have not even begun to get into Obamacare.

So no I don't understand how having more voices in the house is going to make things worse. I don't think they can get worse. but I am a pessimist about government. I audited governmental agencies and have seen how they work.

Indi, The Conservative Party is a joke, just like the Libertarians are a joke. They have yanked themselves out of the one place they could actually make a difference so they can go play with themselves and pretend that anyone cares what they think.

I would LOVE to create a liberal version on the left because that would wipe out their ability to ever change or ever get elected. It is political stupidity of the highest order.

As for the Tea Party, donations don't matter because "they" aren't running for office. They are millions of people working their way up one position at a time within the Republican Party until they control the levers of power. That's how you change a party and that's what they are doing, and that's why they will be successful -- because they are actually doing something to change the system... unlike the Conservative Party.

Wow, Obama now claims he was "too polite" in the debate! And Biden claims he lost to Palin because he didn't want to look like a bully, but he's going to be aggressive with Ryan. What a couple of jerks.

Andrew and Indi, I'm not an expert on political systems, but I can promise you that if we tried to implement a multi-party system, one of two things would happen very quickly. We would either drop it like a hot potato, or we would go over to a parliamentary system of government. Because once parties are allowed to splinter, we would rapidly reach a situation where someone whose views are only acceptable to 20-30 percent of voters would be elected President, and no way the other 70-80 percent are going to stand for him having such a powerful office and such a small base. We would have to have a European-style parliament, with little to no separation of powers, no-confidence votes, party coalitions, and all that. I, personally, would rather try to take over one of our two parties than screw around with all that.

Oh, Duq, I read that too. Obama was just being polite. Yeah, I believe that. If anything he could claim he was "just being polite" up until the point that Romney started playing hardball. THEN Obama just went into a altitude-induced coma brought on by never having been challenged by ANYONE before and never having to directly (without TOTUS) account for his record...

And Duq, at least Biden admits that he "lost" to Palin. But he lost because he's an idiot who has been wasting space in Congress for over 40 years. That doesn't say much for the people of Delaware who re-elected him all those years. And the fact that he could "lose" to a neophyte mayor of a small town in Alaska who had only been Gov for less than two years says alot about how idiotic he is!

DUQ, I saw that. That's why I think he won't be able to right his ship, because he just doesn't understand why he went wrong. I think he's going to come out unbelievably nasty and will horrify a good number of independents.

T-Rav, I think that's right. It would be a disaster. And think about how pissed people would be when one of the two large parties got together with a strange array of ideological opposite parties like they do in Germany at times -- a Republican, Green, Party of Bling coalition.

It would be a mess and I think people would demand change almost immediately.

And you're right, a system like that would require a powerful central government like the European parliamentary governments and Americans would hate that.

Bev, Are you saying the altitude combined with Romney being nasty induced his coma? And here I thought it was him being worried that Madame O wouldn't like the gift he bought her. ;)

On Biden, it should be a shock that someone who has been in Congress that long and supposedly is an expert on foreign policy could get his butt handed to him by a woman with no real political experience and who apparently doesn't even read. There is just no way that should happen... unless he's an idiot. And we do know that Biden is an idiot, as shown by his record.

I really hope he comes out truly nasty and tries to overplay his hand because I think Ryan will make a fool of him in that event. If I was preparing Joe, I would recommend a cautious, polite, "presidential" approach to win people over.

K, I haven't paid attention to this conversation, but I would say that there is a strain in fundamentalism which thinks that the ends (in this case the Second Coming) justify the means, and that force may be used to replicate their own sect's laws on a national level. I'm not going to get into this much, as I don't want to ruin my reputation of being a "sensible" RR member, but that's my take in a nutshell.

K, I'm talking about the people who run the foundations and lobbying groups on behalf of those causes. I'm talking about the people who put out pamphlets that question whether or not following Obama's policies will result result in the appearance of the Antichrist and who say things exactly what Akin said in Missouri.